Camus and the philosophy of absurd

Albert Camus develops in his impressive essay Le mythe de Sisyphe his positive view of the situation of Man. He put in perspective the entire existentialist movement, transcends its view and offers an admirable future: Man is condemned like Sisyphe but he is and will be happy in his condemnation.

First, it is an observation, the existentialist observation that Man cannot access the Truth: the world is irrational, relativist, what is true for one may be not for another. But it is also the recognition that Man is nonetheless driven by such Unity of Knowledge. From that confrontation is born the philosophy of absurd:

"[C]e qui est absurde, c'est la confrontation de cet irrationnel et de ce désir éperdu de clarté dont l'appel résonne au plus profond de l'homme."

[Les murs absurdes]

Camus notices, however, that the greatest existentialists failed to pursue their own philosophy and, afraid of their findings, either turned back, consciously or unconsciously, to the religious God they previously eliminated, or looked at this absurdity as a new God. In both cases, they betrayed themselves: they first find that Life has no meaning but finish by giving it a meaning via some artifact.

Camus, instead, thinks that there is no need to such despair:

"[L'homme absurde] reconnaît la lutte, ne méprise pas absolument la raison et admet l'irrationnel."

[Le suicide philosophique]

Or again:

"L'absurde, c'est la raison lucide qui constate ses limites."

[Le suicide philosophique]

Camus considers that Man should look at his fate not only without fear but proudly and live thoroughly and passionately such contradiction and absurdity. He sees the absurdity as an opportunity: instead of keeping oneself blind with illusions, he is fighting, constantly, ceaselessly, the more so knowing that there is no goal to reach. For Camus, the fight, the revolt is the only way of life:

"L'une des seules positions philosophiques cohérentes, c'est ainsi la révolte."

[La liberté absurde]

He seems to join some of the romantic movement who also came to the same conclusion.

What is left is actually a quite positive view of the world, where Man is in charge of his fate:

"Un monde demeure dont l'homme est le seul maître"

[La création sans lendemain],

free of past illusions:

"Non pas la fable divine qui amuse et aveugle, mais le visage, le geste et le drame terrestres où se résument une difficile sagesse et une passion sans lendemain."

[La création sans lendemain]

Camus concludes with the myth of Sisyphus, a man condemned by the Gods in Hell to continually roll up the hill a head-high stone which has to be let it down at the end of each cycle. Although most of us would see it as a punishment, Camus invites to imagine on the contrary the smile of Sisyphus among his time of despair:

"Je laisse Sisyphe au bas de la montagne! On retrouve toujours son fardeau. Mais Sisyphe enseigne la fidélité supérieure qui nie les dieux et soulève les rochers. Lui aussi juge que tout va bien. Cet univers désormais sans maître lui paraît ni stérile ni futile. Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque éclat minérale de cette montagne pleine de nuit, à lui seul forme un monde. La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux."

[Le mythe de Sisyphe]

"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

[The myth of Sisyphus]

A salute to the Romantic and Postmodern movements

Although Edward O. Wilson disagrees in general with the ideas of and motivations behind the Romantic and Postmodern movements, here is what he has to say about them:

"As today's celebrants of corybantic Romanticism, they enrich culture. They say to the rest of us: Maybe, just maybe, you are wrong. Their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away from all directions, bevoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects. That is one reason to think well of postmodernism, even as it menaces rational thought. Another is the relief it affords those who have chosen not to encumber themselves with a scientific education. Another is the small industry it has created within philosophy and literary studies. Still another, the one that counts the most, is the unyielding critique of traditional scholarship it provides. We will always need postmodernists or their rebellious equivalents. For what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces? John Stuart Mill correctly noted that teacher and learner alike fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field. And if somehow, against all the evidence, against all reason, the linchpin falls out and everything is reduced to epistemological confusion, we will find the courage to admit that the postmodernists were right, and in the best spirit of the Enlightenment, we will start over again. Because, as the great mathematician David Hilbert once said, capturing so well that part of the human spirit expressed through the Enlightenment, Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know, we will know."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, Chapter 3

The moon and sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham

Some quotations from the wonderfully written The moon and sixpence by Somerset W. Maugham. It is followed by two questions, in need of answer.

"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour."

(Chapter XIII)

About beauty:

"'Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiviness and imagination'"

(Chapter XIX)

On the difficulty in expressing oneself and being understood:

"Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemmed to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house."

(Chapter XLII)

Once beauty is reached, it has to be destroyed. Neither the artist, nor anyone else can enjoy it again. And in any case beauty can be kept:

"'I think Strickland knew it was a masterpiece. He had achieved what he wanted. His life was complete. He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.

(Chapter LVII)

Here are my two questions:

1) Why the title The moon and sixpence?

2) The central character of the book is Charles Strickland and his life is loosely inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin. At least, that is what I read everywhere. The story is told by a narrator using the first person, which we might think is Somerset W. Maugham himself. Everything should just be a fiction: Strickland, Maugham's meetings with Strickland, etc. But strikingly, the first chapter refers in footnotes three different books which supposedly describe the life of Charles Strickland. One reference reads:

A modern artist: notes on the work of Charles Strickland, by Edward Leggatt, A.R.H.A. Martin Secker, 1917.

Is this a real reference? And is Charles Strickland then real as well? I was not able to locate any the books, so I am wondering if I am not just the victim of Maugham's ability to push the fiction to such a realism that he does not hesitate to cross the line and violate the fragile convention that footnotes and references are part of reality and out of the fiction. And the joke might just be on me!

The importance of becoming against all odds

"To be free is nothing, to become free is very heaven."
Fichte, untraced, quoted in The Roots of Romanticism, The Restrained Romantics, by Isaiah Berlin

Berlin explains that "Fichte's whole notion is that man is a kind of continuous action [...]. In order to rise to his full height he must constantly go on generating and creating." (ibid, The Restrained Romantics). He continues by saying that "[Y]ou felt yourself properly only in a moment of resistance or opposition" (ibid, Unbridled Romanticism).

Thus, a romantic has to be active. He has to be not only when the world prevents him to do so, but also when his goal is unreachable. If he can reach his goal, the combat is not worthy. The romantic can fully experience life only when he tries to climb an impossible summit. Only in this situation, he will be able - indeed will be obliged - to express the fullness of her or his heart. Fichte's quotation and Berlin's explanations remind me the poetic lyrics of Mano Solo, a french-speaking singer, in Le Monde Entier:

"Si tu m'avais demandé, moi je t'aurai dit
Que dans la vie ce qui compte
c'est pas l'issue mais c'est le combat"

or André Gorz speaking of writing in Lettre à D., histoire d'un amour:

"Ce n'est pas ce qu'il écrit qui est le but premier de l'écrivain. Son besoin premier est d'écrire."

See also this quotation from Gandhi (in French) from Cedric's blog.

Cultural relativism according to Herder

"What is the ideal form of life? We cannot be both Greek and Phoenician and medieval, and Eastern and Western, and Northern and Southern. We cannot attain to the highest ideals of all centuries and all places at onces."
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, The True Fathers of Romanticism

We might be not be able to understand anymore the mind of the Greeks, but I still would believe that we can understand the minds of other peoples which are our contemporaries. In the first case, you cannot experience anymore the life of the Greeks beyond their writings, which are an imperfect - but still rich - way to know a people. In the second case, you can become or try to become one of them, although you might never be entirely accepted by the visited communauty, except if you are one these excentric English travelers ready to disguise to discover what is officially forbidden to the foreign.

"Le romantisme, c'est la révolution"

"Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie du siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself. It is Shelley's dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also its white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fülle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great 'I Am', harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all-containing spirit. It is the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable. Also it is the familiar, the sense of one's unique tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature, and the accustomed sights and sounds of contended, simple, rural folk - the sane and happy wisdom of rosy-cheeked sons of the soil. It is the ancient, the historic, it is Gothic cathedrals, mists of antiquity, ancien roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualities, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable. Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy innocence, joy in the passing instant, a sense of timelessness. It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages. But also it is happy co-operation in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a Church, a class, a party, a tradition, a great and all-containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the Church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, 'la terre et les morts', as Barrès said, the great society of the dead and the living and the yet unborn. [...] It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art's sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death."
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, In Search of a Definition

In summary, Romanticism contains in one single hat all the conflicting feelings of the woman and of the man.

Beethoven, a figure of the Romantic movement

"The figure who dominates the nineteenth century as an image is the tousled figure of Beethoven in his garret. Beethoven is a man who does what is in him. He is poor, he is ignorant, he is boorish. His manners are bad, he knows little, and he is perhaps not a very interesting figure, apart from the inspiration which drives him forward. But he has not sold out. He sits in his garret and he creates. He creates in accordance with the light which is within him, and that is all that a man should do; that is what makes a man a hero."
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, In Search of a Definition